Made sense, but—“What about the local witches? Have you consulted with them at all?”
“I did,” she said, and frowned, “but the local coven wanted to use Stun spells and nets.” (Which was another way of solving the problem—with a low survival rate for the pixies.) “But I want it done humanely”—she smoothed her hand over her camera—“which is the way Spellcrackers does it, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes.” Humane to the pixies anyway; my arms still itched from their bites. Not that I’d want to catch them any other way. And after all, like all fae, I’m fast-healing, a bonus of being virtually immortal. So Dora’s answers meant I was good to go, other than my last niggle of unease: “Where are the pixies?” I asked her.
“Mostly up on the third floor,” Dora said. “But your office mentioned you’d probably need to close the portal in the swimming pool first.” I nodded. It was standard operating procedure: pointless rounding them up before you’d stopped more coming through. Dora led me to the door at the end of the hallway, “It’s down here, in the basement,” and then she added in a rush, “I’m not sure, but there might be a bit of a problem.”
I bit back a sigh. I hated it when clients didn’t tell you everything going in; it always made my job harder. But at least that explained where my last doubt was coming from.
I gave her my best professional smile. “Why don’t you show me, then?”
She opened the door to reveal a modern glass-and-chrome stairway that clashed with the rest of the house and the half-finished mural of ancient ruins and olive trees that decorated the stairwell wall. As we descended, the sound of crashing waves assaulted my ears and the salty scent of open water cut with the rank smell of death slapped me in the face. Either Dora had a hell of a wave pool down here, or she was right, and there was definitely a problem.
We reached the bottom of the stairs, walked along a long opaque-glass corridor, and at the end she opened another door.
The sound of the sea intensified.
I walked through the door with a feeling of trepidation. I just knew this wasn’t going to be good.
The room and the swimming pool were both bigger than I’d expected. The pool was fifty feet long, thirty feet wide, and eighteen feet at the deep end, going by the markings stenciled onto the very obvious white squares on the walls, which ruined the whole illusion of the painted panoramic vistas. And judging by the way the pool’s edges wavered with magic, instead of the pixie portal being the usual, easily closed hole about the size of a dinner plate, this portal was the size of the pool. Which explained why the waves were rolling toward us like we were on a beach in the Mediterranean, why the expanse of sandy-colored terra-cotta tiles (which was almost as large at the pool) was littered with dead fish and seaweed, and why there were three shark fins cutting an ominous figure eight in the pool’s sea-dark water.
I stared, stunned, then walked to the water’s edge. “How long’s it been like this?” I asked, pleased my voice came out calm.
“Maybe a week?” Dora pulled a face. “Bruno, the mural painter, has been off sick, so no one’s been down here. I didn’t realize it was like this myself until not long ago, otherwise I’d have said when I phoned. You can sort it, can’t you?”
No way in hell. This was way out of my league, but—I forced my mouth back into my professional smile. “I’m going to need some help with this.” I dug out my phone. This needed a coven, but they were all at the Spring Rites, or scrying for the missing boys . . .
But there was someone who could help. Someone who was in his element in water, and who’d told me to call him. Tavish. Okay, so this probably wasn’t the sort of call he was expecting . . .
He answered on the first ring. Keen. “Hello, doll,” he said in his soft burr.
“Hey,” I said, brightly, “I’ve got a bit of a fishy problem here. A big one. Sharks.”
“Dinna let them bite you, doll.”
“Ha, ha,” I said. “But seriously, Tavish, there are sharks here, and I’m not about to start reenacting Jaws.”
“ ’Tis nae the sharks I’m fussed about. Tell the lamia: ten minutes. And see if you can find out where the children are.” The phone went dead.
I stared at it, my mind whirling. Why did Tavish sound like he knew what was going on? What children? And who was the lamia? I transferred my stare to Dora, who, though she had her eyes squeezed shut, had her camera up and was snapping pictures like her life depended on it, and the paranoia in my backpack jumped out and sucker-punched me. “What’s going on, Dora?” I demanded.
“What did he say, girl?” the heavy accented voice came from behind me.
I jerked around to see Dora’s Aunt Malia. The old woman was blocking the doorway in the opaque glass wall. Now that she was under the brighter lights of the pool room, I could see that it wasn’t wrinkles and eczema causing her face to look disfigured and scaly, but actual scales. She had to be the lamia. Of course, the big tipoff came when I looked down. Flowing out from under her heavy black dress was the tree-trunkthick, red-and-black body of a gigantic snake. I froze, and while the scared part of my mind was screaming Run! the rest was rifling through my mental “lamia” file for any useful information.
“Are you both lamias?” I asked, surprised my voice still came out calm.
“Yes,” said Dora, hugging her camera like a security blanket. “Well, Auntie is, and I almost am.” Her hand went to the tattoo at her throat.
My mental “lamia” file search hit pay dirt. The original lamia had a fling with Zeus, and Hera, Zeus’s wife, was understandably none too happy. In revenge, Hera forced the lamia to devour their offspring. But, insane with grief, the lamia didn’t stop at killing her own children, and went on a feeding frenzy. Zeus finally pacified her with the gift of prophecy whenever she removed her eyes. Which wasn’t any sort of compensation to my mind, but hey, what do I know. But although Zeus had soothed the lamia’s madness, he was too late to stop her from turning into a daemon: one whose existence was sustained by eating children. And Tavish had told me to find the children. I put that together with the recent media splash and looked horrified from Dora to her snaky aunt. “Fuck, are you the ones who snatched the two missing boys?”
Aunt Snaky’s lips lifted in a long hiss. “How long will it be until the kelpie is arriving?” She had fangs. And going by her expression, she obviously expected me to dissolve into hysterics and tell her everything I knew. Which wasn’t much. Yet. My horror turned to icy determination. I wished, and not for the first frustrated time, that I could cast my own spells and solve the situation with some sort of magic, but I couldn’t. So instead I needed to find out where the kids were and, more important, work out how to save them.
“How long?” Aunt Snaky said impatiently.
“Ten minutes,” I said, and then not really expecting an answer, I asked, “Where are the boys?”
“They’re still alive. Just,” Dora said, surprising me, her eyes darting momentarily toward the shark-infested pool.
They were in the pool? How was that possible? And was my impression that Dora wasn’t happy about things right, or was that just my own wishful thinking? I narrowed my eyes at her. “What does ‘just alive’ mean?” When she shrugged, I hit her with the next question: “What do you want Tavish for?”
“The kelpie is to retrieve something,” Aunt Snaky said. “If he will agree, you will not be harmed.”
Yeah, and I’m the queen of the goblins. “Retrieve what?”
“Theodora, bring the girl.” A dry rustle whispered under the sound of the pool’s waves as she turned and slithered along the corridor toward the stairs.
So, I was Tavish’s incentive. Not that it mattered, since no way was I going to let him swap me for two little kids. And what did they want him to retrieve? Although another look at the swimming pool gave me a clue: Tavish was in his element in the water; if the boys were—what? imprisoned, trapped, or maybe hiding?—in the pool, then more than likely it was them.
Dora gave me a rictuslike
smile—with no fangs; maybe her almost lamia comment meant she still had to eat her first kid before she fully metamorphosed?—and indicated I should follow. As the only other way out was the portal in the pool, and the sharks didn’t look any friendlier than Aunt Snaky, I followed.
“So, was the magazine story, the pixies and all this, just a scam to get me here?” I asked, belatedly wishing I’d listened to my paranoia.
“No, it’s all true,” Dora said, a flicker of misery crossing her face. “I really am an heiress, and I did just get married.”
Was the misery real? “You know,” I said in a low voice, “if your aunt’s coercing you in some way, I can help you, and we can save the boys.”
“You can’t. I thought you could . . .” She looked down at her camera screen, her fingers convulsed, then she said accusingly, “But you can’t even cast the simplest spell, can you?” She was right, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t try something. “No, I might not want this, but I’ve got no choice. I’m my aunt’s heiress, and I’m not talking about money. I’ve got plenty of that.”
“There are always choices,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, like what?” she muttered derisively. “Oh, and don’t be fooled by Auntie”—she gave the lamia’s swaying back a defeated look—“she might move slow, but her skin’s as tough as old boots and I’ve seen her kill a swamp dragon with one flick of her tail.”
Swamp dragons are huge, the size of a double-decker bus.
“At least tell me where the boys are?” I asked urgently, hoping she couldn’t see how rattled I was.
“I told you,” she almost growled, “they’re in the pool.” She shoved past me, ignoring my question as to how they were in the pool, and stomped after her aunt.
By the time we reached the entrance hallway—lamias are apparently akin to snails when it comes to stairs—Tavish was shouting and banging his fists on the front door.
Dora hurried to open it.
I hung back and made a grab for the hefty sledgehammer I’d seen earlier—it was big enough to do damage to a mountain troll, so hopefully it would make a dent in a lamia—but before my fingers touched it, Auntie’s scaly tail whipped out, clamped around my middle, and pinned my arms in place. Then I was suddenly lifted and plonked down on my butt about six feet back from the open front door. I struggled and kicked, but despite my efforts, I couldn’t escape my snaky straitjacket.
“Be still, girl.” Aunt Snaky squeezed me, and pain bloomed down my arms.
Worried she’d break bones, I stopped wriggling and cast a searching look around.
Dora was almost hiding behind the open front door, white-knuckled hands gripping her camera. No help there. Tavish was outside under the colonnaded porch. He was a dark shape against the deep purple haze of the early evening sky, his eyes swirling bright silver, and his dreads dripping with glittering water—no, I looked, not water, but power. And it wasn’t the sky that was hazy, but the Ward; it wasn’t the sucker one from earlier, but something much heftier. Crap, that wasn’t going to be easy to crack.
“The missing boys are in the swimming pool,” I shouted at Tavish, “and it’s got a pixie portal in it.”
“Quiet, girl.” Aunt Snaky shook me.
“Oh, and there’s three sharks,” I gasped.
“Guid to know, doll.” Tavish smiled, teeth white and sharp and equally sharklike against his green-black skin. “Tell me what you are wanting, Malia?”
“I will return this one to you,” Aunt Snaky said, “if you agree to retrieve the children for me. One of the boys is a wizard; he has taken himself and his friend out of our reach.”
So they are hiding in the pool, not trapped. Clever little wizard.
Tavish obviously thought so too, as he laughed and visibly relaxed. “Then we dinna have anything to bargain with, Malia. You are already shedding. ’Twill nae be much longer before you slip your skin, and you’ll nae manage to hold this Ward, nor the one enclosing the square, once your madness comes upon you.” He crossed his arms. “So, I’ll be waiting until then to retrieve the children.”
Sounded like a plan . . .
“Do you not worry for your sidhe?” she asked.
Tavish gave me a considering look. “She’s nae a child, and her soul is too dark to serve as your food.”
I’ve got a dark soul? Whatever happened to being a rainbow? Still, good to know Tavish wasn’t going to fall for Auntie’s ransom demands, and that I wasn’t on Auntie’s menu.
“Especially when your own blood is handy.” Tavish waved at Dora, still huddling almost behind the door.
But Dora was? Pity whispered through me. No wonder she was miserable.
Oddly Dora lifted her camera, shut her eyes, and snapped a couple of shots of Tavish. “The boys will be dead before the ritual is completed,” she said in a distant voice. “You will be too late to save them.”
“Tell me, lass,” he said softly.
The camera flashed again. “If you pass the threshold before the ritual starts, their future changes.”
“What to?”
Her eyes snapped open as she lowered the camera and said with a touch of exasperation, “I can’t see it until it changes; you know that.”
I groaned in disbelief. “Tavish, she’s lying to make you agree.”
Tavish lifted his gaze to mine, and then his eyes flickered to Auntie behind me. “Now I ken why you’re here, Malia, and why this time you risk all to take other than your own kin. Your lassie here has inherited the gift of prophecy given to you by Zeus.”
“Yes.” Auntie sounded both proud and regretful. “It is over a century since a sibyl was last born to my blood, and none before has ever had such easy use of His gift. The digital camera is a glorious invention; seeing through it is less painful than removing one’s eyes.”
“Tavish.” I struggled against Auntie’s constricting tail. “C’mon, they’re trying to scam you.”
“Nae, doll.” He shook his head. “Sibyls have to speak of that which they see, nae matter even if the speaking will lead them to harm. If the lassie says the boys will die if I dinna come in, then that is their future.” He pointed at me. “But before I do, Malia, you will let the sidhe go.”
“Theodora,” Auntie said, “do you have it?”
Dora moved to a small table and picked up a halter of golden rope, knocking off the computer game she’d shown me earlier as she did. She carefully put the game back on the table next to the glossy mag, her fingers gently lingering on her wedding picture as if she were reluctant to let it go. Then she held up the golden halter to show Tavish.
He gave a derisive snort. “I offer you my word, Malia. There is nae need to bind me to your servitude.”
“You do not think I would trust your kelpie half to be compelled by your word alone?” She sounded like he must really think her stupid. “It is too wylde and easily lost to the lure of the water.” Which was news to me. I hadn’t realized Tavish’s other shape wasn’t just him in another form, but judging by the frustration in Tavish’s eyes, she was right, and he’d been hoping she wouldn’t know.
Tension thickened the air, and I thought we’d hit some sort of supernatural Mexican standoff—
The sudden sting of fangs in my throat startled me more than any actual pain. I yelped in surprise, and stupidly thought, Damn, she’s bitten me.
“With my venom in her body, kelpie,” Aunt Snaky said, “the girl will die before dawn, even with her sidhe blood. Agree, and I will give you the antidote.”
Sick fear curdled my belly. I swallowed and pushed it away. I frowned down at Auntie’s red-and-black scaly tail wrapped around me. She had the antidote, but to get it, Tavish had to let her bind him with the golden halter. But if he was bound, then Auntie would hold all the aces, and I’d bet all of Dora’s fortune that that would end up with Tavish, me, and more horrifically, the boys dead. Because no way was Aunt Snaky going to say Thank you and wish us good health after her dinner.
“Die before dawn’s a bit d
ramatic, isn’t it?” I tilted my head back to look up at Auntie. Her hair had dropped out, and her features appeared to have melted, leaving her head doing a good impersonation of an egg, if eggs had red-and-black scales. Very attractive. “Don’t s’pose you could be more specific about how much time I’ve got left?”
She frowned at me, then looked back at Tavish. “Do you agree, kelpie?”
In answer, Tavish screamed with rage and smacked his palms against the Ward. His magic rolled over me like the pressure wave after an explosion. My ears popped painfully, but the Ward didn’t break, just flashed the vivid crimson of an anti-crack grid and absorbed all the juice he’d thrown at it.
“Kelpie, you cannot break the Ward by force.” Aunt Snaky echoed my thoughts. “The more power you use against it, the stronger it becomes. And I would that you were at your best for the task I require of you.”
He curled his hands into frustrated fists and dropped his arms. Then he smiled. It was his kelpie smile full of Charm, a predator’s smile, but one that cajoled and tempted and beguiled. A smile that pledged to take all my sorrow, all my loss, all my hurt and leave my soul light and pure and at peace, if I would only come to him, and join with him in the depths . . . I clawed at the scaly tail that imprisoned me, fighting to go to him, to be with him—
“Theodora! Stop!”
Auntie’s shout broke the Charm-net Tavish had caught me in, and I sagged in her hold, bereft and despairing as if I’d lost something precious. The sound of sobs made me look up, and I blinked at Dora. She was on her knees at the front door, grief-stricken tears streaming down her face, and the hand with the gold halter stretched out to Tavish, frozen with her fingers only millimeters away from the Ward. Damn, he’d almost gotten her to break it. But the Ward was still there—An idea burned bright as dragon’s fire in my mind.
“You are also time wasting, kelpie,” Aunt Snaky said sharply. “Do you agree?”
“Hey, Tavish,” I called, “speaking of time wasting, I thought you said my soul looked like rainbows this morning?”
Tavish shook himself like a horse shedding water and sent me a puzzled look. “What, doll?”
Home Improvement: Undead Edition Page 33
